Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Luke-Jr
2005-12-04T04:46:36Z

On Sunday 04 December 2005 00:20, Greg KH wrote:
> > Switch "broken bloaty bulky devfs" to "lean & clean devfs"? This ship
> > would have been flying the "clean-up nation" flags.
>
> Again, because an in-kernel devfs is not the correct thing to do. devfs
> has been disabled for a few months now, and I don't think anyone has
> missed it yet :)

Well, devfs does have some abilities udev doesn't: hotplug/udev doesn't detect
everything, and can result in rarer or non-PnP devices not being
automatically available; devfs has the effect of trying to load a module when
a program looks for the devices it provides-- while it can cause problems, it
does have a possibility to work better. Interesting effects of switching my
desktop from devfs to udev:
1. my DVD burners are left uninitialized until I manually modprobe ide-cd or
(more recently) ide-scsi
2. my sound card is autodetected and the drivers loaded, but the OSS emulation
modules are omitted; with devfs, they would be autoloaded when an app tried
to use OSS
devfs also has the advantage of keeping the module info all in one place-- the
kernel or the module. In particular, with udev the detection and /dev info is
scattered into different locations of the filesystem. This can probably be
fixed easily simply by having udev read such info from modules or via a /sys
entry, though.
--
Luke-Jr
Developer, Utopios